YouTuber SoftwareDR says, “This is Joy Division live on Something Else Studio. Recorded Transmission in this John Peel session. My first try to create a stop motion film. Hope you like it.”
(via ahcom)
Writing a book is an heroic process, it really is, but even more so when it comes to biographies. Especially these days when so few people bother to read books anymore and the rewards are seldom very remunerative for most authors. In the case of biographers, it’s a different kind of satisfaction. It takes a real sense of purpose and desire to see someone’s story told properly; to get things down as accurately as possible for history’s sake before the participants are picked off by time. In this sense, there is often a very real race against the clock.
I’m quite partial to biographies. I have a pretty sizable personal library, and by far the largest part of the books I own are life histories, especially the tales of cult figures or rebellious type people (Beats, Lenny Bruce, Leary, Crowley, Dali, Warhol, etc). There is a special fondness I have for books about extremely marginal personalities (Andy Milligan, Charles Hawtrey, Charles Ludlam) and I appreciate the effort, the true labor of love, that goes into such obscure endeavors. The more obsessive, the better.
Marjorie Cameron (1922-1995) was a “witchy woman” and Beatnik artist known widely in several overlapping Los Angeles bohemian circles, but she was hardly famous. Since her death, there has been a gradually growing public awareness of Cameron’s art, or at least what’s left of her work, that the artist herself did not destroy in a moment of mental instability. Her paintings, now highly sought after by collectors, can sell for in the tens of thousands of dollars. In recent memory, her work has been exhibited in major museums (The Whitney’s “Beat Culture” show and the the excellent “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle” exhibit) and the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in NYC published a gorgeous monograph of her work in 2007.
Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron
Cameron’s often wobbly orbit in life saw her cross paths with significant cultural players like underground filmmaker Kennth Anger, who cast her as “The Scarlet Woman” (typecasting!) in his 1956 film, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, which also featured author Anais Nin. (Anger was Cameron’s roommate at several points over the decades they knew one another). She was certainly a part of Wallace Berman’s intimates and co-starred in. Night Tide a low-budget horror film with Dennis Hopper (who recounts a brief period of sexual intimacy with the older woman). Crisscrossing the country and tracking down all of the various characters the author spoke to must have been quite a chore, and as a reader and longtime admirer of Cameron’s work, I’m grateful for the attention Kansa paid to detail.
Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron
Below, one of Cameron’s brief, but memorable, scenes in Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Dennis Hopper stars in creepy 60s Beatnik cult film, ‘Night Tide’
Cairo artist and electronic musician Ahmed Basiony died at age 32 on January 28, the fourth day of major anti-government demonstrations in his home city.
Basiony’s rather remarkable music is being played continuously on 100radiostation, an arm of Egyptian experimentalist Mahmoud Refat’s now-offline 100copies organization, which organizes the annual 100live electronic music festival in Cairo.
Here he is performing at the 100live festival in 2010:
Basiony leaves behind a wife and son. Let’s hope this revolution is worth all the lives and creative talent lost. Peace, justice, power and freedom to the people of Egypt.
Hat-tip Marc Weidenbaum at disquiet.
We’ve lost two art film goddesses this week. First Maria Schneider and now Lena Nyman.
Nyman starred in the controversial I Am Curious (Yellow) and it’s sequel I Am Curious (Blue). These were iconic films for anyone growing up in the 1960s. As curious teenagers we all tried to sneak into theaters screening these Swedish soft-core films that combined free love with a radical political viewpoint.
When the film arrived in the United States, it was seized by customs as pornographic material, which, if allowed into the country would lead to more race riots and political assassinations, not to mention another Vietnam War elsewhere in Asia or perhaps Africa.
Following an anti-censorship battle in US courts, I Am Curious (Yellow) was finally allowed to be shown on American screens in 1969. Thanks to all the free publicity provided by various branches of the US government, it became the biggest foreign-language box-office hit ever in the United States, grossing $20.23m (or about $113.3m today). If inflation is taken into account, I Am Curious (Yellow) remains the record holder among non-English-language releases in the US.
More importantly, I Am Curious (Yellow) set a legal precedent that changed the meaning of the word “obscene,” thus allowing other sexually provocative motion pictures to enter the United States, among them Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Decameron (1971) and Tales of Canterbury (1973), and the aforementioned Last Tango in Paris.”
Lena Nyman starred in over 50 films in her lifetime, including Bergman’s Autumn Sonata. She died after suffering from a longterm illness. She was 66.
Here’s a scene that was cut from the final version of I am Curious (Blue).
Demdike Stare stand at the crossroads of dub, minimal techno, ambient electronica and abstract expressionism. At midnight under a full moon. Performing ritual musik magick. The duo of Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker, from the greater Manchester area and part of the Pendel Coven family of acts, have been slowly and subtly carving out their own niche over the last few years. They are very witchey, and slightly housey, but this is not witch house. This is something else.
Tending to keep a low profile, their vinyl releases on the Modern Love label have come in beautifully packaged limited editions (with artwork by renowned DJ and designer Andy Votel) and have seen them gain a dedicated following among future music heads. Now all three of their previous albums have been gathered into one deluxe CD set called Tryptych, which also features 40 minutes of bonus material. Tryptych is available from Boomkat in the UK, on both CD and digital formats. This is real headphone music - listen closely to hear the subtle psychedelic details, and to feel the ebb and flow of the seemingly free form tracks. Beautiful, haunting pianos and strings rub up against layers of found sound, treated heavily but subtly, and all underpinned by some seriously heavy bass.
The Demdike Stare live show is worth catching if you can, as they are accompanied by some beautiful visuals made up of obscure vintage horror films,worked live to correspond to the music. There are a few of these audio/visual clips on YouTube, like this one for “Forest Of Evil” (which contains both male and female nudity).
Demdike Stare “Forest Of Evil” (most likely NSFW)
After the jump, more Demdike Stare videos, and artwork by Andy Votel.
A collaboration between one Cecil Stokes (1910-1956) and Bing Crosby (natch) sometime in the ‘40s, an Auroratone film was apparently meant to be used in the treatment of mental disorders. As one does. The colors and crystal patterns are indeed quite lovely and Der Bingle and his organ are dreamy (or something).
More about Auroratone films here
With thanks to Devin Sarno
Cairo-based British journalist Sara Carr continues to bring some fantastic street-level photojournalism from her adopted home city, including some shots of the spray-paint agitprop going on in the capitol.
Carr and some others have just assembled a Cairo offshoot from the Occupied London site, reporting on the ground, and along with Democracy Now, it’s proven a great item to add to your Egyptian Revolution RSS. They’ve already posted twice on today’s ruthless and unsurprising pro-Mubarak raid on Tahrir Square.
“No to Mubarak, no to Nazif, no to Sorour”
(Refers to Ahmed Nazif, Prime Minister for past 7 years until yesterday, and Ahmad Fathi Sorour, speaker of the People’s Assembly since 1991 and first in the official line of succession as President after Mubarak)
“Down with the regime” with inverted “Eagle of Saladin” coat of arms from the Egyptian flag.
Stencil of Mubarak; underneath, the Arabic word “Irhal”, meaning “Leave”.
12ozProphet, “the largest graffiti, street art and pop culture community online”, collaborated with film maker Justin Hogan in the creation of this short documentary on graffiti legend and pop culture icon Futura 2000.
Leonard (Futura) talks about the early days of being a street art pioneer, his experiences with The Clash, Madonna, life in Brooklyn and his current projects.
VHS 2005 Foam
Humorous artistic tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s inscrutable cinematic masterpiece created in 2005 by David Herbert. What I’m more interested in is seeing the VCR that can handle this gargantuan tape.
(via Booooooom!)
Today I lay before you two LPs by possibly the same artist (nobody knows for sure who these people are !) from mid-70’s Japan that I’ve long felt represented some of the strongest home-made psychedelic music ever made. I give you my ever-effusive compatriot, Eric Lumbleau of the mighty Mutant Sounds blog to illuminate further:
These mid-‘70s releases - by interconnected musicians about whom nothing is known - represent two of the highest peaks of Japanese psych-prog weirdness. Brast Burn’s Debon is an intricate con catenation of cascading sleigh bells and hand drums, windswept Himalayan acid atmospherics, bottleneck acoustic-guitar twiddle and Damo Suzuki-like mantric babble. All of the above is held aloft by a synthesist with a terminal case of pitch wheel woozies and is strategically embellished with outbursts of tumbling bass drums, spiraling flutes and recorders, and some exquisitly hallucinogenic electric guitar. Coming on like an eternal cosmic caravan, the whole damn thing is soaked in a higher-key music of the spheres vibe. Yes, Brast Burn are indeed the real goods, and they will suck you into a hypnogogic reverie. Karuna Khyal are, by contrast, an altogether more psychotic proposition, quite capable of inducing frontal lobe fatigue in those lacking a hardy constitution. Great monolithic slabs of damaged, half speed Beefheartian swamp dirge, replete with squawking, overblown mouth harp, collide with undulating waves of Throbbing Gristle-esque electronic distortion, as the group stridently trudge across your neuroreceptors and eroding your sanity. Attempting to reconcile the contents of those disparate dispatches is a losing game. If there ia any thread connecting these excursions, it’s in the mantrically intoned vocals that wend their way through both of these outings; though the volatility of the vocal delivery on Alomoni 1985 renders even these ties tenuous. Suffice to say, both of these forays into the outer reaches of sound are perched near the zenith of radical innovation.
It’s true, rock ‘em loud !
Brast Burn - Debon SIde One
Brast Burn - Debon Side Two
Karuna Khyal - Alomoni 1985 Side One
Karuna Khyal - Alomoni 1985 Side Two